 Black Dahlia, Inc.
The Big Story.
Elizabeth Short became an instantly marketable image by virtue of her lifeless, bloodlet and bisected, over-aged nude corpse having been placed in a vacant lot in the city of Los Angeles, on January, 15th. 1947. The first clear profits went to the media.
The L.A. Examiner owned the story from the start, allthough the rival Times of L.A. had their moment early on helping with the FBI's identification of the shattered body. Even the killer would eventually shill for the Examiner's coverage, such was the mark the Hearst paper put on the story.
The next person to hunker up was Jack Webb and his Mark VII Productions who made a few bags of money with his books (The Badge, $15.50 hardcover),and television series, homo-erotic peans to the now Parker led LAPD, the still unsolved Black Dahlia murder taking an early and prominent place in the Big Spin, which would prop the Department's image up all over the TV wasteland of the Fifties and Sixties, until you could't tell them apart...Martin Milner or Marvin Margolis?
Lucy Arnaz happened onto the the case as a Made-for-T.V. project in the early seventies. Little Lucy was a stickler for accuracy and a good egg as she even hired poor old Harry Hansen, the lead dick who failed initially, on as technical advisor to the project. Though Harry's take on the case hadn't changed all that much, the money did all right, with a few bucks in it for the Hat, as well...Disco fever.
The Eighties were the Golden Age of Black Dahlia fiction with the publication of the long awaited Ellroy novel finally hitting the bookstores in 1987 cementing his reputation as the Steven King of L.A. crime/noir fiction. $28 hardcover. Ellroy and the Dahlia, a marrage made in money., despite his agonizing over the murder since childhood, the fact's of the case are of no interest to him, as his novel clearly shows.
The mid-to-late nineties would see the dot com boom and bust and the new age of chicken-feed. As hacks like Pam Hazelton bring internet skills to the search for any more money to be squeezed from the horror, and now ten years laters she's still looking for some (below). Also in 1998, "Severed" by John Gilmore, a first and rather feeble attempt at acertaining the true story. Gilmore tried, but with his accent and obvious out of townishness, he was ripe pickings for the cops, wiseguys and con artists they sent his way. Including Jack "Lanky" Wilson, the legendary Alcalde of Los Alkywood.
The Big Money.
Let's tune in to November, 2006. The Major Hollywood treatment of Ellroy's "The Black Dahlia". Everybody then got lined up for the tie-ins, a Hollywood throw-back big premier, cigarette and cigar product placements. Buses, bums and butts.
The L.A Times did a major retospective on the case. Even putting out with their Ace reporter Larry Harnisch, who had himself once "solved" the case for the Time's coverage of murder's 50th. Birthday Retro Sp.Ed. in 1997. Johnny Depp even did a blurb.
Roll credits. Plotting, and then there she was, Elizabeth Short, taking it right up the ass from another girl with a vibrator, a single tear welling in her left eye and rolling down her cheek in a unforgettable image of pure Hollywood pornographic sentiment, "Oh that poor, poor girl. Where's the K-Y Jelly on that product placement?"
The lubricant you seek is money. The vaseline and the gasoline that keep the Black Dahlia parasites going as long as the suckers still buy the books and watch the films and DVD they hand out, and read the petty narscisstic twaddle posted by the sickos and perverts at the website du jour.
Yeah, that's the image of Beth they want to promote today. A lesbian porno toy queen, in a stag movie within a snuff film, and always receedng further from the truth about Beth herself and her terrible wanton demise at the hand of a vicious madman killer who then went off and killed himself a couple of months later, with the cops nowhere to be seen. That's a story with no marketable value at all, or so it would seem. Maybe that's all it's worth, but I doubt it. No money in it.
 Mia Kirschner
7:27:01 AM 
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